Abstract
This paper considers the relation between mytho-poetic narrative and practical philosophy in an Idealist/Romantic fragment, usually attributed to Hegel, known as the ‘System-programme’. Like many works of the young Hegel, the text seeks political reform through a reform of religion and suggests that for politics to be truly motivating reason must be embedded in mytho-poetic discourse. This Hegelian ‘reform’ is in the service of a new, sensuous, practical rationality and a motivating political praxis. The paper places these issues in the context of the religious thought of J.J. Rousseau, particularly his religious themes, as presented in The Social Contract. The paper also connects these issues to a political problem identified in recent work by Simon Critchley, the problem of practical or moral motivation. Critchley claims that while citizens of secular, liberal, democratic societies experience the political norms that shape their lives as externally binding, these norms are not internally compelling. Against this he claims that what are motivating are frameworks of belief that call the secular project into question. At least one of Critchley’s solutions to this problem is connected to the sphere of the religious. While accepting the idea that connecting social and political problems to religion can render them motivating, this paper will withhold from endorsing either the solution offered by the young Hegel in the ‘System-programme’ or Critchley’s, and raises doubts also about the Rousseauian response. It argues that these solutions fail to adequately address the problem they face: how to render contemporary political life internally compelling for modern political subjects?
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Notes
This text has received considerable attention both in the popular and academic presses. In regard to the popular press the text precipitated a heated public debate between Critchley and S. Žižek that featured in such forums as The London Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine (see S. Žižek LRB, 29:22, 15 November, 2007 and, LRB 30:2, 24 January, 2008; see also S. Critchley HM, May, 2008). In regard to academic papers the debate was the focus of a special edition of Critical Horizons Journal.
Here Critchley is stressing the ambiguous status of the legislator. The legislator belongs neither to the order of nature nor the order of politics and so is not like normal human agents, yet who legislates for society without being part of it, nor subject to its laws, gives force to the law. Of course the legislator is not in fact divine, the aura of divinity is fictional and serves a political role, it lends the law the force of majesty; the fiction of divinity thus serves a political end and is thus subordinate to that political end.
Michael suggested this in a paper presented to the Annual Conference of The Hegel Society of Great Britain. Oxford, UK: August, 2003.
This is surely also interesting in terms of any kind of neo-anarchist project, such as the one that Critchley announces in his Infinitely Demanding (2007). For surely such a project cannot be founded on a pessimism in regard to human nature; surely such a project must have as its foundation a positive philosophical anthropology.
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Quadrio, P.A. Morality, Politics and Mytho-Poetic Discourse in the Oldest System-Programme for German Idealism: The Rousseauian Answer to a Contemporary Question. SOPHIA 50, 625–640 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0223-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0223-3